Senate Judiciary Committee lawmakers questioned the government’s phone...
Senate Judiciary Committee lawmakers questioned the government’s phone surveillance program due to revelations in recent weeks about how few calls the program clocks. During a Wednesday hearing with the five members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Sen.…
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Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said the idea that the government collects perhaps only 30 percent of all call metadata information “contradicts representations made to the court in justification of the program itself” and by President Barack Obama. Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was not present but also expressed concern in a written opening statement. “The intelligence community has defended its unprecedented, massive, and indiscriminate bulk collection by arguing that it needs the entire ‘haystack’ in order for it to have an effective counterterrorism tool -- and yet the American public now hears that the intelligence really only has 20 to 30 percent of that haystack,” Leahy said (http://1.usa.gov/1j3NMi2). “That calls even further into question the effectiveness of this program.” Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., expressed disappointment that over half a year since surveillance revelations, it’s still unclear how much bulk collection is happening and pressed for more transparency and disclosure related to surveillance requests. A recent Justice Department announcement on a partnership with such companies “didn’t address the bulk collection question,” said PCLOB member Jim Dempsey, vice president-public policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Franken argued that companies want this surveillance request information to be more public, but Dempsey countered that it may depend. “Honestly I think there may be a split between what the telephone companies want to do and the Internet companies want to do,” Dempsey said. “I'm not sure about that."